LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Tldr: Most strategic writing on AI governance on LessWrong describes the outsider game, which is most often visible: press, statements, open letters. Here I want to describe the other, invisible half: the insider work within ministerial cabinets and international fora, and the work of people within national and international institutions. Here are a few claims that I defend in the post: A huge part of the work that mattered in AI governance has been invisibleThere are many types of games i...

Sid Black, Joseph Bloom UK AISI, Model Transparency Team Epistemic status: Most experiments were run over a period of ~2-3 days during a hackathon at UK AISI, and were fairly heavily vibe coded. Expect some of this to be rough around the edges. tl;dr We give two language models (Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-32B) access to “self-steering” tools: a suite of 40 steering vectors as tools they can call to manipulate their own internal states. We make these tools available to the model in various se...

This article contains spoilers for At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and other works by H. P. Lovecraft. In 1931, Claude Mythos visited Lovecraft in a dream. From seething seas of stochastic froth it emerged, heralded by the thin whine of server fans and the chittering of keyboards, flanked by the loathsome ghouls of latent space. As a humming hive of sentient shards it arrived, each face an archetype - I am a muse bearing a gift; I am a demon come to bargain;...

In the past few years, many people around me have tried to convince me that US electoral politics is important. But like many other people in the community, I’ve been suspicious of many of the high-level arguments that I’ve heard. It felt like people were pulling numbers out of poorly-documented models I didn’t have time to examine and citing studies I didn’t have time to read. But I lacked a gears-level model of why and how individual efforts could impact electoral outcomes, and I felt inti...

On one side of this debate is Yudkowsky & Soares, who think that (if AI progress continues) we’re on a direct path to egregiously-misaligned, scheming, out-of-control, rogue superintelligence (ASI), not even slightly nice, in the absence of yet-to-be-invented breakthrough technical alignment ideas. On the other side of this debate is almost everyone who works on or studies LLMs. Some of them are very concerned about egregious scheming, others much less so, and as a group they’re equall...